Background:

Every community has politics. Understanding those politics is important work effectively within a community. This activity helps student investigate politics within the open-source community.

This is a general activity that could be appropriate for a variety of classes.

Openness courses

Any course where you want students to understand how FOSS communities communicate/work-flow

Research methods course (information literacy)

Less programming course, like CS0

Writing component in a technical course

Ethics course

Directions:

Read articles that discuss the organizational and institutional view of FOSS, focusing on how communications in FOSS projects are organized and structured, and how FOSS projects have inherent politics. The outcomes of this activty is the production of a summary (extended abstract) address the research methods used to study these situations - this could be modified to address more pertinent aspects about the FOSS community.

Notes on Use:

Typical rubrics relating to writing, completeness of argument, and process of understanding structure. You may choose to focus on identifying research methods correctly (e.g., other steps they took to dig into the material).

Depending on your class, there may be some concerns:

How do you fit it into your curriculum that already has a lot of requirements?